Piers Akerman: Played, Albo achieved nothing but faux goodwill and happy snaps
Australia’s diplomatic investment with China has been almost all one way and at the expense of our long-standing alliance with the US, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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It certainly doesn’t take much to play Anthony Albanese. A banquet, a trip to the Great Wall and usual tourist sights and our Prime Minister rolled over like his dog, Toto, for China’s President Xi.
Barry Humphries’ iconic caricature of a diplomat, Sir Les Patterson, would have smelled a rat as he tossed back the baijiu toasts, and he would have known that the obsequious flatterers thronged in the Great Hall of the People were pissing in his pocket.
Albo, however, seems to sincerely believe that he’s beloved of the Chinese – just as they repeatedly told him – unlike his wicked predecessor, Scott Morrison, who so unkindly told China the truth about Covid and then felt their wrath.
It’s difficult to believe that Albanese is so naive. When UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Adolf Hitler in September 1938, declaring he had secured “peace in our time”, he was convinced that he was dealing with an honourable person he could trust. He was wrong, and Hitler’s armies rolled into what remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and then Poland in September.
Albanese is dealing with a dictator who has made no secret of his plans to expand the Chinese Communist Party’s influence throughout the Pacific. Examples of China’s contempt for our sovereignty are numerous, from the live-firing exercises conducted in the Tasman Sea to the circumnavigation of our nation by survey craft equipped with unmanned undersea drones capable of mapping critical cables and underwater canyons used by submarines.
We now learn that Chinese interests have bought land strategically located adjacent to our mooted nuclear submarine bases.
China may be our largest trading partner but we know from bitter experience that the authoritarian government is capable of blocking shipments for political purposes.
It is somewhat ironic that our foremost conservative prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, was called “Pig Iron Bob” by striking trade unionists when, as attorney-general, he supported the export of pig iron from Port Kembla to Japan when Japan was at war with China.
Iron ore, coal and gas are now are major exports to China but there is no similar outcry from the union movement, though there is no doubt about China’s aggression toward our neighbours in the Western Pacific.
The hypocrisy of sending coal to China’s 1161 coal-fired power stations while we close our coal-fired baseload power plants in pursuit of a nonsensical unachievable net-zero goal is beyond staggering. Despite the known pitfalls of relying on China as our major customer, there have been desultory government moves to open alternate markets in Europe or Asia.
On Monday, Bastille Day, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto stood with French President Emmanuel Macron as a contingent of Indonesian military and national police marched alongside French armed forces on the Champs-Elysees.
With such soft diplomacy, France has locked in military sales to Indonesia worth more than $10bn, with further orders for jets, submarines and light frigates in the pipeline.
Our soft diplomacy consists of Welcome to Country performances and a display of art work at the 2026 Venice Biennale celebrating an Islamist terrorist leader.
Albanese won little more than a photo opportunity on the Great Wall and a visit to an ageing panda once on loan to the Adelaide Zoo for his abject kowtowing.
Our diplomatic investment with China has been almost all one way and at the expense of our long-standing alliance with the US – a nation that shares our most basic values. Despite all the tummy tickling, China remains a strategic threat to our interests.
Albanese and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, were cheap dates, easily wooed, and just as easily farewelled.
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